Setting up the Android-x86 emulator can take a little work, however it will reap significant dividends in reduced app development time.
This port of Android to the x86 platform allows the emulator to be installed within a standard VirtualBox instance, and results in much faster speed and interactivity while reducing the memory footprint. Instead of using the built-in Google emulator, it is possible to build a custom Android emulator using the Android-x86 project. While native extensions do exist for certain processors, such as Intel processors supporting virtualization, many other processors and development environments are not supported.įortunately, a good alternative emulation solution exists. This causes significant lag in phone operation. The emulator is actually a Virtual Machine that runs ARM instructions, so each Java app first needs to run in Android’s Java VM, then get translated to ARM, and finally emulated from ARM to x86. Unfortunately, Google’s Android emulator runs extremely slow on many PCs. The first is to deploy directly to a phone, and the second is to deploy to an emulator – a software version of the phone running on the PC. While the Android build and testing environment provided by Google has many excellent features, there are only two built-in ways to deploy and test apps. Altogether, this results in more polished, full-featured apps, and faster app time-to-market. Quick builds and deployments enable better testing of new functionality, since the developer retains the changes fresh in his mind and can make fixes iteratively instead of in large batches. The key to successful rapid application development is a fast deployment and testing environment.